Subtle Variations and Other Stories

By Miriam Karmel

A dazzling, lively, and masterful collection of short stories that is the recipient of the inaugural Holy Cow! Press "First Fiction" prize. Nearly every story has been previously published; three have won the Tamarack Award, the Waasnode Short Fiction Prize, and the Moment/Karma short fiction prize. With humor and insightfulness, the topics range from motherhood, Jewish American culture, marriage/divorce/old age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Holy Cow Press
• Release date: Sep 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9780998601014

Book preview

The Queen of Love

MY NONNA DIDN’T TAKE THE ASSASSINATION OF JFK AS HARD as she did the breakup of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. She was inconsolable for days. During her Ricardo Breakdown Period she continued to do the washing and ironing and dusting, and to sit on the edge of her seat at every dinner, waiting for Grandfather to cut into his meat and pronounce it done. But Nonna could cry while she cleaned and broiled, and cry she did.

I was sure she’d gotten over it until one summer afternoon when the two of us were sitting around watching an I Love Lucy rerun. I must have been ten or eleven, still at an age when I found it thrilling to ride the bus to her house and hang out with her. Just the two of us. It was one of those fuggy August days when even the noise from the oscillating fan seemed to generate too much heat, and the only thing left to do was bathe in the cool blue light of the TV.

I remember the way she sat in the recliner, knitting a pair of argyle socks, something she could do even with the lights low, as if she didn’t need to worry about picking up a blue strand instead of a yellow or red. But that afternoon she dropped a stitch. I wouldn’t have known except that she muttered, Damn, a word I’d never, ever, heard her say. Then she let the tangle of needles and bobbins fall into her lap and she started to cry.

I went over and knelt beside her. What’s the matter, Nonna? I said, gently stroking her soft, doughy arm. She felt cool and smelled faintly of bread that’s rising.

Look. Look, she stuttered, pointing to the TV.

It was that show where the Ricardos and Mertzes pile into a convertible and drive to California. While Nonna and I fanned ourselves with back issues of the TV Guide, they were in that old car laughing and singing, California Here We Come.

The Hollywood shows were Nonna’s favorites. She loved the idea of Lucy and Ricky and Fred and Ethel escaping that cramped little New York City apartment building for the wide-open spaces of California. She thought the Ricardos, and the Mertzes by extension, deserved a life of palm trees, convertibles, and sunglasses. After all, hadn’t Nonna improved her life by migrating west? In her case, the move was from a confined village along the ever-changing borders between Poland and Russia to a not-quite rambling suburban Chicago tract home, known as a ranch-style, though it was missing the cattle. Nonna never looked back. Even when Grandfather begged her to travel to Europe on vacation, in style, she put her foot down. Old buildings, she’d say. I’m through with all that. Clearly, the Ricardos and Mertzes were headed in the right direction. West. To Hollywood. Where everything was new.

That’s not to say she would have minded had they gone on forever in New York City. It’s just that Nonna liked to say, How can you keep them down on the farm after they’ve see Paris? She pronounced Paris the way she thought a true Parisian would say it. Like this: Pa-ree. Los Angeles was just like Pa-ree, only newer.

By the smiles on their faces, the Ricardos and Mertzes must have thought only good times were ahead. But this being a rerun, we knew better. Not that anything tragic would befall them, just the normal kinds of Lucy hijinks that made everyone, especially Ricky, adore her. We knew that Lucy would get to kiss William Holden after an embarrassing encounter at the Brown Derby. We knew that she’d have a hilarious meeting with Harpo Marx. And by then we knew that Ricky and Lucy would go their separate ways.

What I didn’t know, until that afternoon, was that Nonna still hadn’t gotten over their divorce. She was pointing at the screen with the two couples riding along in that old convertible. And even when that familiar heart interrupted the action for a commercial break, she was still pointing. I wondered if I was about to lose her to Yiddish, something she broke into whenever she was flustered. It was a trait she shared with Ricky Ricardo, only he ranted in Spanish when he popped his cork.

One minute they’re happy, Nonna said, when she found her voice. The next, pfft, nothing. She snapped her fingers before drying her eyes with the hem of her housedress.

I remember wanting to ask if she thought Lucy had picked Desi? Or had it been the other way around? But Nonna had picked up her knitting, and by the way she dug her needle into each stitch without glancing at the TV, I decided to keep that particular thought to myself.

You see, love was Nonna’s stock in trade, something that pipsqueak rabbi completely overlooked when, years later, he eulogized her as a housekeeper par excellence. What he failed to note was that Nonna was single-handedly responsible for nine marriages, ten if you count the one that she and her friend Gertie Miller had fought over. Neither Gertie nor Nonna wanted to take credit for that particular liaison, which ended in divorce.

Nine. Ten. The point is that Nonna was a skillful matchmaker. Not only did she have an eye for immediate physical attraction, but she knew (with the exception of Andrea Berman and the dentist) when it would stick. All of the couples, knock on wood—which is what Nonna did whenever she spoke about any of them and their impending anniversaries, births of their children, bar mitzvahs—were still married.

Now it occurs to me that Nonna took the Ricardo breakup as personally as if she had arranged it herself. Her confidence had been badly shaken when Andrea and the dentist (I never knew his name) called it quits. Then the Ricardos parted ways. She must have wondered how such a calamity could occur under her watch. Could she have done anything to prevent it? I think she feared that she was losing her touch. Bad timing, to say the least, given that she had the GGs to marry off in a couple of years. This must be what drove Nonna, if not over the edge, to tears of frustration and dropped stitches.

That’s what she called us. My GGs, she would say, looking from one granddaughter to the other, her eyes misting over. Her gorgeous girls. We even began calling ourselves that, believing it to be true.

We used to gather at Nonna’s on Friday nights for dinner and a sleepover. Sometimes we’d stay up all night smearing our faces with her Ponds, our lips with her Scarlet Splendor. We’d speak in fake Hungarian accents like the Gabors. Nonna was such a fan of the Gabor sisters that one summer, at the peak of their popularity, she bleached her hair blond and must have imagined she looked just like Zsa Zsa. She did not. She was very pretty, but she was no glamour puss. She was too soft for true glamour, more like a neatly folded stack of white fluffy towels than a gold lamé dress.

We vamped around the living room in Nonna’s high heels and slinky slips feeling gorgeous, and Nonna did nothing to dispel our fantasy. When we weren’t vamping, we’d sit around the kitchen table playing crazy eights or canasta, listening to Broadway show tunes (Nonna had a fantastic collection,) eating bridge mix from Nonna’s favorite pink cut-glass dish, and sipping tea from tall glasses, the way Grandfather liked it, with sugar cubes and paper-thin slices of lemon floating on top. We played, and Nonna talked about love.

Ruthie, the oldest, was fourteen the year Nonna started lecturing us on matters of the heart. Then, in descending order, came Vivian, Pearl, me (Sophie), and Dara, the youngest, who was eleven and a half. (She never gave her age without the fraction.) That’s how old we were when Nonna started in with her preaching: Pretty soon the boys will be picking you, not the other way around. In Nonna’s book, the girls were supposed to pick the boys, but let the boys think otherwise.

She never wavered in her conviction that women are smarter than men. But they should never let on, she’d say. Coy? Nonna invented it. Not drop-your-handkerchief coy. She preferred dizzy spells and, if all else failed, fainting. But save it for the right one, she warned. If we told her nobody went around in need of smelling salts anymore, she reminded us that if we weren’t careful, the boys would do the picking.

Nonna wanted us to get the crème de la crème, the pick of the crop, the best banana in the bunch. I think she imagined her GGs walking down a receiving line of the most eligible bachelors in Chicago, pausing long enough to ask each man a few questions before moving on. It never occurred to her that we all might fight over the same guy, or that not since King Ahasuares picked Esther from a lineup of all the pretty maidens in Shushan has this been done.

Don’t think we didn’t remind Nonna that she and Grandfather had an arranged marriage, agreed upon by their widower fathers over glasses of plum wine at Grandfather’s house in Stashev, the village fifteen miles from the one where Nonna grew up. We’d cut our teeth on that story. Nonna was sixteen, Grandfather two years older. We knew that Nonna had loved a man called Bondit. Given Nonna’s thick accent it sounded like a perversion of bandit, and I imagined that she’d once fallen in love with a desperado, and that only by the grace of God, or more specifically, by the dictates of an arrangement, was she lucky enough to escape his clutches and end up where she belonged, with Grandfather. To this day, whenever anyone says to me, Tell me one happy marriage, I always say, My Nonna and Grandfather. They were happy.

But there was no arguing with the Queen of Contradiction. That was then, she’d say, dismissing us with a wave of her hand. This is America.

Chastened, we’d play a few hands in silence, the only sounds were the shuffling of the deck, the slapping of cards against the red Formica tabletop.

Then we’d remind her of all the marriages she’d arranged (carefully omitting any references to Andrea and the dentist), and she’d flutter that hand again. You’re on your own, girls, she’d say. Now somebody deal.

In hindsight, l think that between Lucy and Ricky and Andrea and the dentist, Nonna simply got cold feet. The GGs had no choice but to pick. The problem is, she never explained how. You’ll just know, she said, whenever we asked. Then she’d hum a few bars from that Guys and Dolls song.

So here’s what happened. Pearl, the group romantic, the one who always had her nose in a book, picked Greg. After graduating from college, they lived together for a few years on a communal farm in Iowa. One day, two months after loaning Greg money to buy a share of the place, Pearl came home and found Greg in bed with Cindy, whom he’d apparently mistaken for communal property. He never repaid the loan.

Vivian moved to Portland, where she works as a nurse in a pediatric cancer ward, and lives with an oncologist named Stella.

Ruthie picked Arnie. Though Nonna didn’t live long enough to dance at their wedding, she would have held Ruthie up as our shining example. Never mind that Arnie’s the kind of guy who sticks his chopsticks in the serving dish, even when he has a cold. A five-bedroom home in Highland Park, with a three-car garage and an eight-burner stove, would have been proof enough for Nonna that Ruthie had picked well.

Dara, sweet Dara, the baby of the group by half a year, never picked. She never even left home, and for years, speculating on the mystery of why not was a favorite family parlor game. There’s something odd about that girl, the family buzzed. But years passed and the fascination waned. Everybody got used to the idea of Dara hanging back, sleeping in her virginal bed, the same way they got used to Vivian sleeping with Stella.

You can get used to almost anything, though I’m still not used to the fact that I’m no longer married. It wasn’t supposed to happen. I remember every September on our anniversary, Simon would congratulate the two of us for having survived another year. Then he’d tick off the couples who had split during the previous twelve months. When I tried warning him not to tempt fate, he’d hiss, That’s insanely superstitious. So every year, as he patted us on the collective back, I secretly crossed my fingers and toes.

I felt a pit in my stomach the year he announced, We’ve beat the odds, Sophie. We’ve surpassed the national average. I wanted to tell him that some things should never be said aloud. Besides, I hated to think or us as quantifiable, like a baseball player’s batting average, or the Cubs’ chances of this being their big year. I wanted to believe there was some magic to sticking together. But I kept my mouth shut and crossed my fingers and toes longer than usual.

Then one day Simon moved out and left me with everything including instructions to clean out the gutters, which he called out as he rolled down the driveway, his Volvo wagon crammed with books and clothes. He left everything behind that couples typically accumulate over two decades. Tables. Lamps. Braided rugs. Ceramic platters. Later, my lawyer said to be grateful, that some couples fight over the pillowcases. But at the time, as I watched his baby blue wagon recede into the distance, I wondered how he could drive away from a life, as if he were doing nothing more than heading off on vacation—one where he intended to change his clothes often and read stacks of books.

After the Volvo disappeared from view, I returned to the house and took off my ring. I considered walking to Lake Michigan and skipping it across the water like a stone, or flushing it down the toilet like a dead goldfish. Instead, I tucked it into a drawer, thinking that someday I might need to sell it.

Then I drove to the cemetery to visit Nonna, the Queen of Love. Maybe I just wanted to rub it in her face. See, Nonna, I followed your advice. I picked. But pfft. What do you have to say to that? I told her that Andrea Berman and the dentist notwithstanding, she shouldn’t have lost her nerve. And Lucy? She picked. And look what happened to her." Of course I still didn’t know whether Lucy picked Desi, or whether it was the other way around. For all I knew, his